Judge cuts to chase, saves court time and money

Judge Michael Mettyear

(CNS): A visiting judge who is sitting in Grand Court this month helped save the public purse from a clear waste of money when he encouraged the crown not to pursue a case that was more than two years old against a local man for a minor offence. Justice Michael Mettyear, who has returned to Cayman to hear a number of serious cases, cleared up the old case, listed as a backup trial, when he bound over the defendant to keep the peace without a conviction.

Justice Mettyear first sat on the Cayman bench last year when he heard the case against former premier McKeeva Bush, who was acquitted of corruption charges in relation to the misuse of a government credit card.

In court Wednesday, he said that money was never the main concern when it came to justice but it “was not irrelevant”.

Dennis Ebanks was charged with a dangerous and negligent act and was scheduled for a Grand Court trial for several days. He was accused of driving his car across and in front of the complainant, who was on a bicycle, in a dangerous manner because of an ongoing argument between the two men.

However, no one was hurt in the incident and the case, which the judge described as a one-off isolated minor event, dated back more than two years, having been adjourned on a number of occasions.

Justice Mettyear is scheduled to hear a firearms case this week, so the case would once again have been adjourned if the judge had not encouraged the crown to accept his proposition and take “a pragmatic approach”.

Given the age of the case, the minor level of offending and the fact that it did not appear to be in the public interest to waste the resources, he bound Ebanks over to keep the peace for 12 months on a $300 bond and recorded no conviction.